Green shoots live in the actions you remain steadfast to pursue, even when they feel tiny and worthless. In the small daily rituals to find a clearer path the genesis of a spark appears in the spring of green.

Green is tenacious. It never gives up.

Every action was (is) progress.

It moves to its own rhythm. It pulls you forward. A big strength in the small. Every move is important. Counted. Your mind pulsates to the beat. A ribbon from heart to mind. In a flowing cadence of green.

When green arrives or returns, outcomes don’t matter anymore. Finally, it hits you: You can’t control the uncontrollable. The ego has fooled you all along, laid a trap.

A wiser presence standing. Sharper around the edges than the shadow of who I was.

Broken free from those who mastered over me.

Green is robust. Thick. A fighter.

I am no longer the reflection in a mirror.

I’m me. In deep-green three dimensional color.

Green is a complete acceptance of what is.

How things are now.

It’s not the path that got me to the place.

It is the place.

Although I’m tempted by the past, which is yellow.

I won’t go back.

To the stain.

I’m armed with silk ribbons of Chartreuse.

Encircling. Ever engaging me in the present.

Green prevents me, guards me from the mistakes of the past.

And I don’t want green to leave again.

I still remember when it disappeared. Bled to white in 2011. Gone forever.

I was sure.

Without green.

It was all over.

And after the fall.

A white winter never arrived.

A shade of green emerged.

What an interesting trip back to now.

Floating on a color.

And green is happiness in many forms. Self-defined.

Find your green.

Here’s the wrap.

Random Thoughts:

1). Green Is Not A Destination. It’s an arrival. As you focus on your daily actions, green grows. Friend and mentor James Altucher found his green, created a Daily Practice. Start a daily practice of your own. Whatever it is. Pick your battles. Then do the work, do the work, do the work to succeed. Train your mind. Every day. Repetitive, positive actions ignite green. Choose the words to yourself carefully, they will set the pace of the day. The words you hear inside will prevent green from leaking out.

2). Green Assures. You are finally back on the right path. New growth seals your progress. You start to recognize who you are, not who others expect you to be. The rules created are your own and if they’re true, honorable, then nobody can take the green away. It will be sealed inside so deep others won’t penetrate. Those who say you can’t succeed, I don’t love you, your rules are unusual fold into the shadow of who you were. Not who you are. They are hidden entities now. Camouflaged in blends of green. And gone from the path. And you’re now grateful.

3). Happy money is green. Clean green. Let’s face it: What is money? Dirty paper steeped in salmonella. The authors of the book, Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending outline the robust green of money. Spending doesn’t lead to happiness, at least not long term. Short term spending is designed to stroke your ego; when the excitement fades you’re back at it. A slave to the high. The art of smarter spending is based on the authors’ research into what I call “green-satisfaction” spending.

Five principles that can lead to monetary bliss:

Buy experiences, not stuff: Spend on memories that will enhance your life colors.

Make it a treat: Keep buying junk you don’t need and the novelty wears off. Research reflects that the category in which people spend the least becomes a greater source of happiness. Track your discretionary spending (fun stuff) for a month. Determine where you spend the most. Do you still derive as much happiness from the spending activity? If not, cut it back. Make it special.

Buy time: Sure, buy that nice house in the suburbs. Get a better bang for your buck. Now sit for four hours a day commuting. See how much you care about all the money you saved. It’s not worth it. Time is worth more than money.

Pay now, consumer later: Studies show paying for an item, service now but consuming later creates happier, greener money than doing the opposite. For example, I love being able to purchase music immediately through ITunes. However, when I pre-order a movie, album selections and receive an e-mail a week later from Apple notifying me that my “pre-order is ready for downloading,” I get more excited over the purchase. Yes, we want everything now, we’re Americans; purchasing and waiting may be a greener way to go.

Invest in others: I love purchasing gifts, giving more than I enjoy receiving. It’s is the basis for research into this principle. According to the authors, a Starbucks gift card provided the most happiness when people used it to buy coffee for someone else.

Happy money is green. Unhappy money is well, bacteria-filled fiber.

Ew?

4). Never Force Green. It will arrive when you’re ready to arrive. Not before. You’ll be driving. At the mall. Wherever. And boom. It’ll hit. I can remember day, time and where I was when green re-engaged. Focus on your daily practices and before you know it – Green. Don’t rush it.

5). Green is victory. You reached a goal, lost the weight, made the bonus, fought the enemy. And you won. All the hard work has paid off.

As I fight a corporate giant seeking to strip me of everything including my career, I see with each move, my green is growing deeper. And I will spend the rest of my life making sure they know it. Others will know it, too. Many others.

My grandmother believed there was this energy connection. I never truly understood until I was much older. She said it was strong enough to forge a heart to the soul. She would lament about this cryptic stuff relentlessly when I was a kid and I’d chalk it up to her old age (40) or her hatred for my grandfather or overcooking the meatballs. I shook my head a lot. In private. I adored her too much to be disrespectful. I thought she was corny most of the time.

Not anymore.

She was funny/strange that way. Nellie believed the genesis of any positive energy was born in the heart. Passion, love. It didn’t matter how good your head was.

If your heart wasn’t in whatever you did, it wasn’t worth shit. I spent much of my life believing in the false energy of ego. A shade of shit. Masked as orange.

And we all know the color of shit.

It isn’t orange.

Well it can be orange. Like at Halloween in the early 70s when I felt it was my duty to eat a dozen Entenmann’s Halloween cupcakes every fall. I recall the “by-product” of overconsumption being orange.

How can you not want to devour 12 of these?

“Grandma, what’s the color of this energy.”

You guessed it.

As a child, happiness danced the color of Princeton orange sparks. And that shade of hope, thank God, hasn’t changed. It disappeared for an extended period. I live with that colorless mark on me. Unfortunate events drain the juice from the orange, quick. It’s never too late for the colors of your life to return.

My ongoing challenge is to continue to experience the orange as a beat-up (and still kicking) adult. And it’s working. The process is slow, but I’ll take it at whatever pace it wants to re-ignite me.

I would dare to say orange has been my pumpkin of joy. All the good things in my life, and I need to count my blessings more often, consistently burst in slices of orange.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels this way about pumpkin. Or orange.

1). All the best lessons from my teachers and mentors burst orange-red. I have applied their lessons to helping people make better financial decisions. Their written and spoken words have elevated me to be a better money manager, empathize deeper with clients and influential people in my field.

Through continuous guidance from James Altucher I have learned to forgive and choose myself. And every time he reminds me to do so (and he’s there a lot for me) I can smell, feel, touch, the fire of orange.

From Kamal Ravikant my orange glows spiritual. His words are always there, reminding me to live my truth, drop the false seduction of ego, control my efforts every day, create the orange on a daily basis and not to worry about the possible black of an outcome I cannot control. I lived in the dark of outcomes, my failures, for too long.

Srinivas Rao‘s words have encouraged me to form my own instruction manual, color outside rules I’ve created. I’m allowing them to breathe in orange, In the spirit of originality. A mental heat, emblazoned deep in orange flame, has helped me break the rules-based chains others have forged for me to follow.

The path I created, the one I now follow, is emblazoned in orange. The boundaries around those rules are mine to own and if the intentions are true orange, the rules will take me to a new shade of success.

Remember the lessons from your teachers and mentors. Write, highlight them, burn them bright orange into your brain. Thank those teachers for the words as much as you can. Never tire. Never forget. Help them. They need you, too.

2). The best memories I have of my loved ones are tangerine-toned. What I choose to remember – the good things about my family – lessons they’ve taught through imperfect action, the ability I possess to make the best Italian spaghetti sauce (thanks nana), my dad’s flair for dress. The birth of my only daughter. It’s funny. She loves everything orange too. Perhaps it’s genetic.

Never let go of the best of the ones you love. Ones who are here now, those who are gone. Honor them in orange as much as you can. They’re looking out for you. Spirits are orange.

3). The limited shades of genius formed outside my comfort zone glow amber. And when they work, I can feel the flame ignite another flash of brilliance until each step I take bursts in shards of orange.

Always remember how society will seek to force you to follow their version of you.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently…they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.”

Steve Jobs

4). The ability to make a difference feels like orange to me. When clients follow my financial advice, when I can help investors overcome an emotional bias, when I know I made an impact to someone’s financial well-being, my faith in orange returns.

Make a difference through your expertise, life experience. We are all experts in something. Even your pain can teach others. How can you share your skills, knowledge in ways that shapes or improves others? Think about it. You already have touched others positively. Now build on it.

5). Orange is sweet, it’s got spice. The environment you live, the people in your life can either add to the sweet and spice of you. Or take it away.

Choose carefully. Say no to an environment and people who suck the sweet and spice out of you. James Altucher has helped me understand the power of “no.” After you say “no,” after the first time, it gets easy. You’ll get good at understanding when to use “no.” Repeating no to yourself is just as important. Are you worthy of saying no, drawing the orange line in the sand?

You are.

And orange will be there.

Orange is autumn.

And autumn reminds us how shedding of the old, transitions us to further growth.

Featured

We were free. Moving quick in a white hot breeze. 1977. When the world flew by in lime green.

Slit through a black bowel of public housing. Deep in the middle of the aged carnival colors of blueviolet, aquamarine and bisque. Coney Island. A narrow way forged between the metropolis, slick brown with rot. The summer New York heat penetrated, bounced from dead, white alley cats forming a yellow haze floating neon pungent sluggish slow in still heat. Bright orange, with a burst of unhealthy steel-gray around the edges, like a healthy pink hue that hesitantly abandoned its soul, was there too. Cats and garbage rotted just that way in July. In 1977. In Coney Island. I remember.

The odor scorched the outer part of our pink nostrils until they flared red. But we didn’t care because this moment was designed to be fleeting. The clear blue of escape from a place we should not have been, was near. And as long as that moped motored us out in one piece, alive, all the Sunday ritual – staring at the newly-painted off white walls behind the rich, marbled altar of St. Simon & Jude’s Church would have been worth it.

Until.

Boom! Black.

The lights went out. A deepest black seeped in from the edges. Beige smoke rose above. From everywhere. It suffocated us like a color. Purple maybe. Stopped us dead. Frozen.

“If you don’t get in the dumpster you’re getting raped and I’m getting robbed,” I said. Heels off. She moved. The color of imminent danger was crimson with dark-red daggers.

We dove boldly into the acrid stench of the mix. Eggplant in color, wet, with sticky blotches of yellow green. The lime-green Puch Moped that was to take us into the wild blue now secured behind the jungle-green metal coffin for the discarded muck public housing didn’t want. Too much green. We puked. The gagging color of cloying hot crimson arose in our noses and throats.

A city summer. In the blackest of blackouts. 1977. I remember the gray shades of memories. The colors brought me back. To an alley. When looters almost discovered a boy, a moped and a girl’s saturated skin with Love’s Baby Soft (always smelled cotton-candy pink to me). All this clear vision from a lone lime-green bicycle I barely noticed. In a driveway. Yesterday. In Houston, Texas. A million miles away – faded into a lemon chiffon of time.

Oh the colors, the colors. Perfect.

Colors have the astounding ability to anchor you back to a time and place for as long as you live. No matter how far to the past you venture. Colors are seeds that blossom the past to the present, immediately. Sort of like songs. Sort of like a person you love, or cherish. If you remember the colors, you’ll know what you feel about a moment is true. And real. Even when others doubt you. Even when you doubt you. The colors make it true. And true is slate blue.

Random Thoughts:

1). How will colors conjure up the past? Today I re-lived the memory of a first dinner. I smelled the thick tapestries of dark & tomato reds. The rich browns of hair and delicate tan of lines, of form, of grace. I’ll never forget the fire-brick colors of what ignited in mind and heart. The reams of gold in the conversation. I re-live those pigments every day.

2). Red & green are the colors of money. When stock markets are green, as they have been since the fiscal cliff (version 1) concluded, I use green to trim growth and profit. When there is red again, a trickle of crimson in the streets, I’m motivated to buy. Use the reds & greens to make smart financial decisions.

3). How will today’s colors form your future? Be careful with the colors you use today to form the thoughts that move you forward. Today I’m staring at coral, firebrick, and forest green from my windows. All soothing, positive colors to me. I’ll make it my business to avoid true dark shades today.

4). What colors will propel you to thank someone today, love someone, be grateful for a communication, a note, one positive word. Close your eyes. Think of those colors. Shamelessly relive the good memories tomorrow of how you changed someone’s attitude. For the better.